Karla Gaerlan, an undocumented twenty-eight year old immigrant from the Philippines, faced deportation at noon on Father’s Day, June 16th. Karla’s husband, Thad, is a US citizen and Army Specialist. They have a nine-month old child, Christopher.

After Christopher was born, Karla struggled with post-partum depression. She was arrested by police officers after an argument with Thad even though he had only a light scratch on his arm. She was not convicted of a crime, but nevertheless was transferred to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the S-COMM program.

The ICE officers arrested her, gave her false information, screamed at her, and threatened her in order to force her into signing away her rights and agreeing to voluntary departure. Only after talking to a lawyer did Karla realize that the officers had lied to her and that she faced a ten-year ban on returning to the United States.

A demonstration to demand that Karla's deportation order be dropped was held at ICE headquarters in San Francisco at Sansome and Washington on June 12th. Anoop Prasad, Asian Law Caucus and Karla's attorney, began the press conference. Karla followed reading her letter to President Obama.

‪SECURE COMMUNITIES AND ADMINISTRATIVE IMMIGRATION POLICIES From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Secure Communities is an American deportation program that relies on partnership among federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies.[1] U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the interior immigration enforcement agency within the Department of Homeland Security, is the program manager. John Morton of ICE called Secure Communities “the future of immigration enforcement” because it “focuses our resources on identifying and removing the most serious criminal offenders first and foremost.”[2] Secure Communities relies on integrated databases and partnerships with local and state jailers to build domestic deportation capacity. The goals, as outlined in a 2009 report to Congress, are to: “1. IDENTIFY criminal aliens through modernized information sharing; 2. PRIORITIZE enforcement actions to ensure apprehension and removal of dangerous criminal aliens; and 3. TRANSFORM criminal alien enforcement processes and systems to achieve lasting results.” [3] The program has come under controversy, however, for misrepresenting who is being picked up and what is expected of law enforcement partners. Secure Communities was created administratively, not by congressional mandate, and to date, no regulations have been promulgated to govern the program’s implementation. MORE

Sunday's article on Secure Communities asks some important questions. Why, despite the Obama administration's focus on deporting criminals, do the numbers tell a different story? Why does the administration’s signature program, Secure Communities (S-Comm), continue to deport so many undocumented workers and so few dangerous persons? Since it became known that Boston had signed up to be a pilot city in the S-Comm experiment, advocates have monitored the program through the monthly reports from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). True to our predictions, S-Comm continues to deport mostly people with minor infractions or no criminal records at all, and not threats to public safety. MORE

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